I played Stardew Valley, developed by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. The game is available on almost all available platforms, and I played it specifically on my Xbox. I’ve been playing the game for a while, and I chose to “date” Shane, an alcoholic character dealing with depression. For this critical play, I want to specifically talk about the development of that relationship.
Chess says in the book of Stardew Valley:
In this game, the structure denies the player any specific climaxes, existing in the never-ending narrative middle. Yet at the same time, the stories within Stardew force the player to think about difficult issues from relationships, to abuse, to mental illness, to environmentalism, to commercialization. The game combines structure with themes in a way that allows a space for deeply feminist narratives.
I want to develop this argument further – specifically, I want to interrogate the way that Shane’s relationship encapsulates – or doesn’t encapsulate – a “feminist narrative.” I think Chess’s definition of a feminist narrative is really a narrative that is good, complex, multidimensional. To call Shane’s narrative feminist means: is Shane’s narrative complex? And is it subversive? I think it is subversive; however, I don’t think it’s complex.
Shane’s schedule is very simple. He lingers in the Saloon every night, and in order to befriend him, and slowly woo him, you really only just have to buy him a beer every night. When you befriend him enough, the cutscenes that particular heart levels trigger often reference his battle with alcoholism or depression and his love of chickens. Shane works at JojaMart, a dead-end job, and he takes care of his goddaughter, Jas, who is an orphan. We know practically nothing else about Shane, and when you marry him, the storyline is still centered on his battle with depression and alcoholism.
According to most sources I’ve read, this is the most complex relationship in the game – the one that deals most with mental health. It is extremely subversive for a presumably silly little game about farming; I was surprised, going into cutscenes, just how subversive they were. In no other game about farming could I help someone deal with such a large and weighty issue. But they still do not pass through the boundary of a sufficiently “complex” narrative for me: Shane is, at the end of the day, a depressive alcoholic. He has about three important character traits that encapsulate his entire personality; the seven or so cutscenes that occur cannot fundamentally capture the endless battle of depression or alcoholism.
At the end of the day, though, I don’t think that that is necessarily Stardew Valley’s fault. A video game about farming, which has so many moving parts, whose fundamental aesthetic is fun, is at its core unable to capture the interiority or complexity that I look for in fully narrative forms, like books or TV. The center of the game isn’t the narrative, but the architectural experience around that narrative. And it’s really all about fun.
I have so many more questions for Chess, as a feminist myself. Isn’t her criteria for a feminist art form the same as what makes good art? And isn’t complexity the only thing that she is demanding, narrative and structural complexity? Really, what makes a feminist work?
In fact, there’s a lot of feminist literature about interrogating the violent, the oppressive, the aggressively male as “exposing” the dark underbelly of misogyny. I think that we can learn more about what makes something feminist by looking at what people think is misogynist than what we think is feminist. But I suppose I can’t really get into all that in this tiny blog post.
